If Microsoft has their way, or even if they sorta have their way and mess it up, there will be no inertia to claim that ground.
Remember, MS is fracturing their own platform horribly with Metro. Post-Metro apps won't be backwards compatible; non-Metro apps won't be forward compatible.
They're basically slaughtering the only thing which guarantees them market dominance. Data itself is, for all intents and purposes for the home market, a non-issue for most people. Even things like Photoshop are available on Android, now.
More importantly, the convergence Windows 8 would have with an Atom based phone is very huge. You could buy a phone that could be your phone, but you could then slot into a tablet and have the same phone be your tablet. Then you could slut it into a laptop "shell" and have it be your laptop.
Explain to me how this is not possible - today - with Android (because it is). Apple is moving in this direction, too, if their platform unification efforts are to be believed. There really isn't anything special about this possibility: I've been wanting such a framework for years now myself (when did the NEC MobilePro 900 come out?)
What's holding that back is hardware and hardware capabilities. Thunderbolt should make it possible, but will require a fair amount of added cost to mobile devices, I'd wager. With USB host and HDMI out on some devices, it's pretty close to possible already, though.
I've got products (computers) which were warrantied for 1 year which have lasted over 10. For electronics with no moving parts it is not unreasonable to expect 10 years of service, even in non-ideal conditions, assuming you do not have severely bad power.
Consider for a moment that cheap and partially blown power supplies can remain putting out power for years, and that the only way to kill a LED is to, basically, burn it out through overvoltage. How likely is that to happen? Hopefully not very, or the fundamental engineering was flawed: the breaker box should be able to handle everything up to being struck by lightning.
When the bulb will last 20 years, quite possibly "more than one", because I'd say the likelihood is fairly high that a renter in 20 years will have never had to change a light bulb?
That said, I've seen incandescent last that long (or longer). I remember the bulb over my grandfather's shop in the basement was easily that old, as were a couple others down there.
That's kind of absurd, since Apple iCloud has negligible penetration for a marginal user base.
If you're going up anyone, you go up against an innovative market leader. Unfortunately, that means Dropbox and Microsoft's SkyDrive.
Most of what iCloud claims to do Google has been doing for quite a few years already (with Android and various connectors for various applications). Google Docs takes care of most of the iCloud requirement, as does the ability to store files within your gmail storage already...
Google is just turning what people are already doing into a tangible and independent service for functional isolation/autonomy.
You realize IPv6 and IPv4 are incompatible, right?
The whole world will never be just IPv6. You've got over 30 years behind IPv4 now, with the proponents of IPv6 wasting our time for over a decade with only marginal penetration. Even then, the penetration is bootstrapping to IPv4 so it doesn't break the original design of the Internet.
Maybe, just maybe, IPv4 will be around for a while. If IPv6 were backward compatible, integrated with OS networking stacks a decade ago, the transition may not be so painful. As it stands, IPv6 will be a long time coming.
Webkit isn't Apple's project. WebKit was around for years before Safari came about - since 1998, when KHTML was released. It wasn't called WebKit until Apple forked it.
Yeah, that's right. It's successful because it forked from an Open Source project.
Ironically, Safari has always managed to languish behind the other WebKit based browsers in terms of actual functionality. Word has it that WebKit2 will likely just be a backport of features which have been in Chrome for some time...
On the contrary, Apple hates standards. When they can (due to market share prominence), they will break those standards. The only reason Apple has 'embraced standards' is because they've been such a negligible force in the market that they've got to do so or nobody would be able to communicate with Apple users.
See: App Store/iTunes and compatibility. When they were the only game in town, they didn't play nice and it was hell to try to get your purchased media in a fashion you so desired, outside the realm of Apple.
Another good example of the lack of standard embrace is Mail App. It stores it's mail in a non-standard format (not mbox, not Maildir, etc.) and, at least until fairly recently, didn't offer the option to export or convert mail.
Apple is a follower, and has been one for some time. They don't do the embrace and extend, but they also don't do much more than embrace. Often, this results in somewhat broken implementations (Preview.app springs to mind).
It was supposed to be that way, back when the Internet was designed. That was before your average business person walked around with two or more Internet connected devices and your average person had at least one - IE, today. The reality is quite different.
Not all devices are created equal. In fact, most devices on a network should not be able to address anything more than themselves and their gateway, and maybe a small subnet of local servers (a use case in which IPv6 would likely be well suited).
What I think is funny is that IPv6 proponents are all gung-ho about IPv6 but then make note of the fact that they use it - with NAT'd IPv4 addresses. Why would you bother doing that if IPv6 met your needs? Well, simply put, it probably doesn't.
But since it's a firewall and not shitty NAT, I have three SSH servers on port 22 and two webservers on port 80 that are publicly routable. Try doing that with NAT
A valid usecase, I will grant you. Point: you probably shouldn't be doing that unless you've got a good reason to be doing it, for security reasons. Small exposure is a good level of exposure, even if the machines are 'secure'. Accidents happen, 0day exploits happen, and people go on vacation. Obscurity has it's place.
The people assigning networks for major ISPs have a hard time understanding IPv4 cidr and subnetting in general as it stands.
If you think addresses which are exponentially more complex are going to make things any easier you've got another thing coming... I can only imagine spending 5 hours on the phone trying to get them to fix their fubars instead of the 2-3 it takes now....
I'm sure I'll be modded flamebait for this, but I take it you don't have much dealing with Apple products in a support capacity. They can be pretty retarded. Little things like:
* Improper grounding on wifi cards in the macbook air * Driver/kernel integration with DHCP * Signed binaries becoming corrupt requiring a full reinstall (or similar) * Removing features and adding steps to perform basic tasks while calling it 'streamlining' * Removing compatibility for no apparent reason (eg. samba removal)
You'd think so, but not treating employees like shit means:
* hiring more of them * hiring more competent people * hiring more managers
In my experience, there are two distinct ways in which people respond to being treated like shit (at least in IT, because that's what Iv'e got experience in):
1) They knuckle down and take it, even becoming willfully and blissfully ignorant of what's going on around them. Their work performance and communication don't really change, though they're really not doing all that much anymore so much as going through the motions. These are the people who are probably on antidepressants, if there is anyone on them, and they're the ones which are either unable to jump jobs due to skillset and/or are too myopic to think they can. (Of course, there could be other things keeping them there, as well.) 2) People who gradually become more terse and less communicative with the 'organization as a whole' due to having too much on their plate, and feeling a debt of personal responsibility towards their clients or the the organization. They can tell what's going on around them because it makes what needs to get done (by them, in all likelihood) more difficult, often by making more work for them without any reward of promise of reward. They'll just end up detaching and doing their job how they know it should be done until they're able to walk out. Think: managerial policy change which results in more busy work, more work in general, or less pay to their pockets despite increased revenues.
It is seen as beneficial by IT employers to foster a culture of fear within their organization, it seems. Keep the IT workers down because they're just there to unclog the information toilets, and they really aren't due any pretenses of adequacy, never mind the pay raise they'd be due if they realized how underpaid they are or how fucked the whole situation is. 2)
My guess is that part of the reason is that they're coming from India, and not places where English is well spoken natively. My understanding is that the less Western your country is, the less likely you are to actually be allowed in... see: massive immigration from North Africa; H1B vista'd Indians and Chinese.
Imagine: I am a 5000 year old demigod, and I have/claim the patent on Germanic languages, being as I gifted the primitive tribal peoples with their own variant thereof.
Now, since I've decided to sue the shit out of people for violating my patents, you can no longer speak a Germanic or Germanic-derived language without paying out - even though I offered my linguistic implementation(s) away for free, and modern languages are only derived from those initial standards.
The above makes about as much sense as what Oracle is claiming.
This is kinda funny, I suppose, if you're not paying attention. There's been a sharp rise in vaccine-resistant whooping cough in the past couple years. The likelihood of complication from the vaccine is possible. And, guess what? You can still get whooping cough later, as an adult, anyway.
My kids are unvacinated. They've all had whooping cough and didn't have to go to the hospital. Anecdotal, sure. But consider:
There were 4 deaths in 9 years caused by whooping cough. Wyoming only has 568,158 (2009) people, with about 380 born per year or 3400 over that 9 year span. So 0.01% of the birthed population over that period died of whooping cough. Is that statistically significant? How many people died from flu virus during that same period, or some other malady like complications from ob/gyn orchestrated birth?
Wyoming is also significant because it's so sparsely populated. It is not uncommon for towns to be several hundred miles from the nearest hospital (or clinic), and can take weeks or months before the weather clears up enough (during the winter) to make traveling with a young baby safe.
Awesome. My current long-term employment fails all 4 of those criteria (b, only slightly, because I'm doing critical work but also pulling the short stick on support more often than not).
Their parents probably wanted them to leave their home region to be educated in the West, where women are allowed to succeed and where there is not a culture of subjugation and oppression. That would potentially account for the higher percentage of women at the conference than elsewhere in the world.
A large percentage of Muslims still practice strict Quranic Islam, and many of them have it in law and enforced custom to force others to obey their interpretation. People are constantly jailed, beaten and even executed for violating these religious laws.
It's called Sharia, and it's the fastest growing socio-political force in the world.
When you show me a SINGLE distro, just one mind you, that not using any tricks can be updated from...oh lets say the 2005 release to current with ZERO breakage then you will have a valid argument.
I have a machine at home which started it's second life in 2002 or so (P3 celeron 733MHz) as a Debian 2.0 box. It's now been upgraded (performed yesterday, a bit late) from that release up through Debian 6. This past update was done remotely, from 1800 miles away. I didn't think twice about rebooting it and expecting it to come back, and every package upgraded properly. There's a fair amount running on this machine, too: mysql, apache, virtualbox headless, and a handful of packages not installed via repository (via standalone deb). Basically, it's a cobbled mess of a machine, and I had no problems. Similarly, I had no problems with the 5 upgrade, and don't remember anything with the 4 upgrade, either: typically, if things get clobbered during an upgrade, I deem it time to wipe and reinstall (which is why I don't typically bother upgrading Windows at all, beyond minor updates).
Also, there's a crucial point you're missing: a linux distribution is a lot more than an OS. It's packages (You realize that I could (probably) update my kernel and base useland for quite some time without running into any sort of compatibility issues, I presume? ) Despite this difference, shit usually Just Works. For instance, for a closer analogy, you can upgrade FreeBSD (which includes all the base utilities) on major versions and still use the same ports tree, usually without any of those ports breaking. Even minor service patches or service packs usually break interoperability in Windows.
For those who don't know, Thunderbolt used to be called LightPeak before it was finished. (Personally, I like the old name better, but that was when the spec defined it as running over fiber instead of copper.) It's been a long time coming, and many of us have been waiting anxiously for it: once it's mature, it'll enable us to do away with pretty much every current high bandwidth bus and will be incredible for storage networks and attached storage.
As for the submitter's claim of it being " far from mainstream outside of Apple products"? Really? How about "far from mainstream". As of right now, it's well outside mainstream: it's even more marginal than, say, Fiberchannel at home. There are literally no significant devices available for it, and the single biggest use case is for a monitor. Apple has no 'claim to fame' in this regard, other than maybe infamy for charging such crazy prices for their Thunderbolt displays. ($1,000 for a 27" LCD? Seriously?)
And yet, if the Apple updates for iOS were to cease, nothing of significance would be lost.
Without knowing the difference, most people would be hard pressed to tell any between a first gen and a last gen iPhone based on how the software works. They didn't get it right the first time, they just haven't improved it.
(Though, not completely true. iPhones don't brick themselves nearly as much as they used to.)
Really? Then why does Windows Security Essentials get an update for some things within a day or so of new malware making the rounds?
You're comparing a vulnerability patch (long cycle reactive) with a detection and removal tool (short cycle reactive). It's not even an intelligent argument.
That may be modded funny, but their response has probably closer to that right now than it is any actual sincere security response.
It's really quite embarrassing (for them). I'd expect this from a small company, not a multibillion (trillion?) dollar international corporation. It does not make me have faith in their ability to effectively and safely maintain their software stack.
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If Microsoft has their way, or even if they sorta have their way and mess it up, there will be no inertia to claim that ground.
Remember, MS is fracturing their own platform horribly with Metro. Post-Metro apps won't be backwards compatible; non-Metro apps won't be forward compatible.
They're basically slaughtering the only thing which guarantees them market dominance. Data itself is, for all intents and purposes for the home market, a non-issue for most people. Even things like Photoshop are available on Android, now.
More importantly, the convergence Windows 8 would have with an Atom based phone is very huge. You could buy a phone that could be your phone, but you could then slot into a tablet and have the same phone be your tablet. Then you could slut it into a laptop "shell" and have it be your laptop.
Explain to me how this is not possible - today - with Android (because it is). Apple is moving in this direction, too, if their platform unification efforts are to be believed. There really isn't anything special about this possibility: I've been wanting such a framework for years now myself (when did the NEC MobilePro 900 come out?)
What's holding that back is hardware and hardware capabilities. Thunderbolt should make it possible, but will require a fair amount of added cost to mobile devices, I'd wager. With USB host and HDMI out on some devices, it's pretty close to possible already, though.
Precisely.
I've got products (computers) which were warrantied for 1 year which have lasted over 10. For electronics with no moving parts it is not unreasonable to expect 10 years of service, even in non-ideal conditions, assuming you do not have severely bad power.
Consider for a moment that cheap and partially blown power supplies can remain putting out power for years, and that the only way to kill a LED is to, basically, burn it out through overvoltage. How likely is that to happen? Hopefully not very, or the fundamental engineering was flawed: the breaker box should be able to handle everything up to being struck by lightning.
When the bulb will last 20 years, quite possibly "more than one", because I'd say the likelihood is fairly high that a renter in 20 years will have never had to change a light bulb?
That said, I've seen incandescent last that long (or longer). I remember the bulb over my grandfather's shop in the basement was easily that old, as were a couple others down there.
That's kind of absurd, since Apple iCloud has negligible penetration for a marginal user base.
If you're going up anyone, you go up against an innovative market leader. Unfortunately, that means Dropbox and Microsoft's SkyDrive.
Most of what iCloud claims to do Google has been doing for quite a few years already (with Android and various connectors for various applications). Google Docs takes care of most of the iCloud requirement, as does the ability to store files within your gmail storage already...
Google is just turning what people are already doing into a tangible and independent service for functional isolation/autonomy.
You realize IPv6 and IPv4 are incompatible, right?
The whole world will never be just IPv6. You've got over 30 years behind IPv4 now, with the proponents of IPv6 wasting our time for over a decade with only marginal penetration. Even then, the penetration is bootstrapping to IPv4 so it doesn't break the original design of the Internet.
Maybe, just maybe, IPv4 will be around for a while. If IPv6 were backward compatible, integrated with OS networking stacks a decade ago, the transition may not be so painful. As it stands, IPv6 will be a long time coming.
Webkit isn't Apple's project. WebKit was around for years before Safari came about - since 1998, when KHTML was released. It wasn't called WebKit until Apple forked it.
Yeah, that's right. It's successful because it forked from an Open Source project.
Ironically, Safari has always managed to languish behind the other WebKit based browsers in terms of actual functionality. Word has it that WebKit2 will likely just be a backport of features which have been in Chrome for some time...
On the contrary, Apple hates standards. When they can (due to market share prominence), they will break those standards. The only reason Apple has 'embraced standards' is because they've been such a negligible force in the market that they've got to do so or nobody would be able to communicate with Apple users.
See: App Store/iTunes and compatibility. When they were the only game in town, they didn't play nice and it was hell to try to get your purchased media in a fashion you so desired, outside the realm of Apple.
Another good example of the lack of standard embrace is Mail App. It stores it's mail in a non-standard format (not mbox, not Maildir, etc.) and, at least until fairly recently, didn't offer the option to export or convert mail.
Apple is a follower, and has been one for some time. They don't do the embrace and extend, but they also don't do much more than embrace. Often, this results in somewhat broken implementations (Preview.app springs to mind).
No more so than you should be of an force armed with Polish revolvers.
Every host is *SUPPOSED* to be addressable.
No, no it is not.
It was supposed to be that way, back when the Internet was designed. That was before your average business person walked around with two or more Internet connected devices and your average person had at least one - IE, today. The reality is quite different.
Not all devices are created equal. In fact, most devices on a network should not be able to address anything more than themselves and their gateway, and maybe a small subnet of local servers (a use case in which IPv6 would likely be well suited).
What I think is funny is that IPv6 proponents are all gung-ho about IPv6 but then make note of the fact that they use it - with NAT'd IPv4 addresses. Why would you bother doing that if IPv6 met your needs? Well, simply put, it probably doesn't.
But since it's a firewall and not shitty NAT, I have three SSH servers on port 22 and two webservers on port 80 that are publicly routable. Try doing that with NAT
A valid usecase, I will grant you. Point: you probably shouldn't be doing that unless you've got a good reason to be doing it, for security reasons. Small exposure is a good level of exposure, even if the machines are 'secure'. Accidents happen, 0day exploits happen, and people go on vacation. Obscurity has it's place.
The people assigning networks for major ISPs have a hard time understanding IPv4 cidr and subnetting in general as it stands.
If you think addresses which are exponentially more complex are going to make things any easier you've got another thing coming... I can only imagine spending 5 hours on the phone trying to get them to fix their fubars instead of the 2-3 it takes now....
I don't think Apple is that retarded...
I'm sure I'll be modded flamebait for this, but I take it you don't have much dealing with Apple products in a support capacity. They can be pretty retarded. Little things like:
* Improper grounding on wifi cards in the macbook air
* Driver/kernel integration with DHCP
* Signed binaries becoming corrupt requiring a full reinstall (or similar)
* Removing features and adding steps to perform basic tasks while calling it 'streamlining'
* Removing compatibility for no apparent reason (eg. samba removal)
You'd think so, but not treating employees like shit means:
* hiring more of them
* hiring more competent people
* hiring more managers
In my experience, there are two distinct ways in which people respond to being treated like shit (at least in IT, because that's what Iv'e got experience in):
1) They knuckle down and take it, even becoming willfully and blissfully ignorant of what's going on around them. Their work performance and communication don't really change, though they're really not doing all that much anymore so much as going through the motions. These are the people who are probably on antidepressants, if there is anyone on them, and they're the ones which are either unable to jump jobs due to skillset and/or are too myopic to think they can. (Of course, there could be other things keeping them there, as well.)
2) People who gradually become more terse and less communicative with the 'organization as a whole' due to having too much on their plate, and feeling a debt of personal responsibility towards their clients or the the organization. They can tell what's going on around them because it makes what needs to get done (by them, in all likelihood) more difficult, often by making more work for them without any reward of promise of reward. They'll just end up detaching and doing their job how they know it should be done until they're able to walk out. Think: managerial policy change which results in more busy work, more work in general, or less pay to their pockets despite increased revenues.
It is seen as beneficial by IT employers to foster a culture of fear within their organization, it seems. Keep the IT workers down because they're just there to unclog the information toilets, and they really aren't due any pretenses of adequacy, never mind the pay raise they'd be due if they realized how underpaid they are or how fucked the whole situation is.
2)
My guess is that part of the reason is that they're coming from India, and not places where English is well spoken natively. My understanding is that the less Western your country is, the less likely you are to actually be allowed in... see: massive immigration from North Africa; H1B vista'd Indians and Chinese.
Precisely.
Imagine: I am a 5000 year old demigod, and I have/claim the patent on Germanic languages, being as I gifted the primitive tribal peoples with their own variant thereof.
Now, since I've decided to sue the shit out of people for violating my patents, you can no longer speak a Germanic or Germanic-derived language without paying out - even though I offered my linguistic implementation(s) away for free, and modern languages are only derived from those initial standards.
The above makes about as much sense as what Oracle is claiming.
Elves? Elves are the factual basis on which Oracle is going after Google/Android?
You have got to be kidding me. The ludicrous nature of that alone points at how obscene patent law has become...
This is kinda funny, I suppose, if you're not paying attention. There's been a sharp rise in vaccine-resistant whooping cough in the past couple years. The likelihood of complication from the vaccine is possible. And, guess what? You can still get whooping cough later, as an adult, anyway.
My kids are unvacinated. They've all had whooping cough and didn't have to go to the hospital. Anecdotal, sure. But consider:
There were 4 deaths in 9 years caused by whooping cough. Wyoming only has 568,158 (2009) people, with about 380 born per year or 3400 over that 9 year span. So 0.01% of the birthed population over that period died of whooping cough. Is that statistically significant? How many people died from flu virus during that same period, or some other malady like complications from ob/gyn orchestrated birth?
Wyoming is also significant because it's so sparsely populated. It is not uncommon for towns to be several hundred miles from the nearest hospital (or clinic), and can take weeks or months before the weather clears up enough (during the winter) to make traveling with a young baby safe.
Awesome. My current long-term employment fails all 4 of those criteria (b, only slightly, because I'm doing critical work but also pulling the short stick on support more often than not).
Their parents probably wanted them to leave their home region to be educated in the West, where women are allowed to succeed and where there is not a culture of subjugation and oppression. That would potentially account for the higher percentage of women at the conference than elsewhere in the world.
A large percentage of Muslims still practice strict Quranic Islam, and many of them have it in law and enforced custom to force others to obey their interpretation. People are constantly jailed, beaten and even executed for violating these religious laws.
It's called Sharia, and it's the fastest growing socio-political force in the world.
When you show me a SINGLE distro, just one mind you, that not using any tricks can be updated from...oh lets say the 2005 release to current with ZERO breakage then you will have a valid argument.
I have a machine at home which started it's second life in 2002 or so (P3 celeron 733MHz) as a Debian 2.0 box. It's now been upgraded (performed yesterday, a bit late) from that release up through Debian 6. This past update was done remotely, from 1800 miles away. I didn't think twice about rebooting it and expecting it to come back, and every package upgraded properly. There's a fair amount running on this machine, too: mysql, apache, virtualbox headless, and a handful of packages not installed via repository (via standalone deb). Basically, it's a cobbled mess of a machine, and I had no problems. Similarly, I had no problems with the 5 upgrade, and don't remember anything with the 4 upgrade, either: typically, if things get clobbered during an upgrade, I deem it time to wipe and reinstall (which is why I don't typically bother upgrading Windows at all, beyond minor updates).
Also, there's a crucial point you're missing: a linux distribution is a lot more than an OS. It's packages (You realize that I could (probably) update my kernel and base useland for quite some time without running into any sort of compatibility issues, I presume? ) Despite this difference, shit usually Just Works. For instance, for a closer analogy, you can upgrade FreeBSD (which includes all the base utilities) on major versions and still use the same ports tree, usually without any of those ports breaking. Even minor service patches or service packs usually break interoperability in Windows.
For those who don't know, Thunderbolt used to be called LightPeak before it was finished. (Personally, I like the old name better, but that was when the spec defined it as running over fiber instead of copper.) It's been a long time coming, and many of us have been waiting anxiously for it: once it's mature, it'll enable us to do away with pretty much every current high bandwidth bus and will be incredible for storage networks and attached storage.
As for the submitter's claim of it being " far from mainstream outside of Apple products"? Really? How about "far from mainstream". As of right now, it's well outside mainstream: it's even more marginal than, say, Fiberchannel at home. There are literally no significant devices available for it, and the single biggest use case is for a monitor. Apple has no 'claim to fame' in this regard, other than maybe infamy for charging such crazy prices for their Thunderbolt displays. ($1,000 for a 27" LCD? Seriously?)
And yet, if the Apple updates for iOS were to cease, nothing of significance would be lost.
Without knowing the difference, most people would be hard pressed to tell any between a first gen and a last gen iPhone based on how the software works. They didn't get it right the first time, they just haven't improved it.
(Though, not completely true. iPhones don't brick themselves nearly as much as they used to.)
Really? Then why does Windows Security Essentials get an update for some things within a day or so of new malware making the rounds?
You're comparing a vulnerability patch (long cycle reactive) with a detection and removal tool (short cycle reactive). It's not even an intelligent argument.
That may be modded funny, but their response has probably closer to that right now than it is any actual sincere security response.
It's really quite embarrassing (for them). I'd expect this from a small company, not a multibillion (trillion?) dollar international corporation. It does not make me have faith in their ability to effectively and safely maintain their software stack.